Chapter 1
Chapter One
EVA
Crawling out of a comfortable bed, unafraid of the outside world, feels surreal. The fact that I’m even here is a miracle. That I was chosen above so many others.
Guilt needles me again. The kind that survivors feel, because that’s what I am. Someone chosen to live a better life when others live in peril.
It’s not that I want the rest of the world to go to hell, but if it does, I’d rather not go down with it.
The cabin isn’t at all what I’d expected it to be like. Up until three days ago, I thought it was a lie or some rundown, dilapidated shack.
Instead, it’s picture-perfect, straight out of an old-timey magazine, with well-crafted furnishings and a charming ambiance that makes me feel like I’m living in the book Little House on the Prairie by that Laura Ingalls Wilder girl.
But I guess that’s the point.
Stretching, I take in a breath of clean air. Then another, letting it sit in my lungs for a moment before exhaling.
Gold holds no value to the cleanliness of this place.
I try to recall all the things I’m supposed to do, hoping I do them in the right order.
Care for the animals. Tend to the garden. Tidy. Eat. Wash up.
For months, I’ve been preparing for this, and yet, I’m still nowhere close to being ready. It feels as though I’m being ungrateful, but the truth is, I’m scared. What if something goes wrong? What if I mess up?
What if he doesn’t like me?
It’s preposterous to think that, because even if he finds me ugly as sin, which I’m not, he’ll do anything to stay here. He’d be stupid to turn his nose up at what’s being offered.
When the planet went to shit, we were told there’d be no going back. The air was toxic. The water, foul. The soil, full of heavy metals that corporations had been seeping into our precious earth. Not that any federal agency cared.
The entire world became a ghetto, and cancer rates skyrocketed, killing without discrimination, all while natural disaster incidents increased. Winters were colder than usual, followed by droughts.
The powers that be realized our peril, but when the governments united and declared a state of emergency twelve years ago, instead of working together, everything fell apart.
Wars broke out. Then came the bombs.
Everywhere.
I was only eight at the time, so young that I didn’t know that things had ever been different. Growing up, I remembered watching the news and hearing about entire cities falling ill due to poisoned waters, but it all seemed far away. Like it was happening on a different planet.
I lived with my mother in a small industrial town that went untouched by the war. We struggled, but I can’t say my very early years were that terrible. And maybe that’s what made what was to come that much harder.
At around nine, my mother fell ill. I didn’t know how serious it was.
She continued to work because she wanted to give me the best life she could.
I remember her saying once that she just had to make it until I was strong enough to survive on my own.
Sickness had claimed my father before I could even walk, so she was all I had.
At twelve, all pretense of things getting better was gone when they canceled school.
By then, the warring had ceased. What was going on in the grander world wasn’t as important as what was happening on our own soil.
Our federal government was dismantled, replaced with bands of opportunistic people trying to claim power.
Our teachers tried to carry on with lessons, some going house to house in search of children to educate, but hope had already extinguished for so many, and to some, their presence was a painful reminder of reality.
By that time, my mother had aged considerably, and work was leaving her exhausted. It was finally clicking in my little, childish brain that this was it, and to both her consternation and relief, I knew I had to start working.
At first, I did laundry for others, tending to our garden in my spare time. Then I went off to work in a factory at fourteen, but that closed two years later. I’ve been doing odd jobs since.
I shake the memories from my head and focus on what I had been taught to do.
Collect eggs for breakfast. Milk the cow. Make sure the sheep, goats, and pigs all have food. Pull weeds.
Instead, I look in the mirror.
What is he going to see when he looks at me? The innocent woman they want him to? Or the girl who went half-crazy after her mom died.
It doesn’t matter what he sees. What matters is what he thinks of the cabin, the garden, the livestock, the bed.
I’m stalling. It’s not so much that I’m afraid of hard work, but this life terrifies me. Hope is an exhausting burden to kindle.
But there’s no way around what I must do, and it’s time that I get my ass outside like I’m supposed to.
EVA
A year ago, I thought my life was as hard as it could get, which is why when I was approached about this position, I believed it would be easy.
I was wrong. Homesteading is a different kind of hard. The rewards aren’t instant, and there’s no end to the work. It’s filthy, but not in the way that my life was before all this. That was a type of unclean I shudder to think about.
Animals don’t care about getting muddy, and they care even less about getting you dirty. Gardening is hard work, even with the modern amenities like the greenhouse set up for me.
Not for me. For us. Because there will be an us.
I’ve only been here days and yet the unending amount of work that needs to be done haunts me.
I swallow hard as I put another forkful of egg in my mouth.
Tomorrow, I’ll be making breakfast for two. And eventually...
I force the thoughts from my head and tell myself again how lucky I am.
When the world went to shit, many expected great men to rise and lead us. But that wasn’t what happened.
Things went local—real local. You relied on your neighbors, you bartered, you helped each other.
And when things got real bad, you sometimes killed one another.
No government, big or small, could fix the problems we faced.
But men in white lab coats claimed they could.
They called themselves the Venus Initiative and came with food and supplies, offering their goods to anyone that would provide samples of their blood.
Of course, we all stood in line, eager to get our hands on something to fill our bellies.
They claimed to be growing all kinds of food, food that could survive the droughts and abnormal temperature patterns. All they needed was a few years of mass production, and we could stabilize.
They stayed for three days, approaching me before leaving with an offer I was in no position to refuse.
Come with them and help restart the world.
That was six months ago.
I left with them, staying in their lab, learning what they called a ‘simpler life.’ Tried and true sustainable ways to exist, while keeping a few of our modern conveniences.
That is, until three days ago.
Words appear on the plasma screen, one of the few displays of technology in the small cottage, reminding me there’s work to be done.
I gather my plate and silverware, wash them in the sink, dry them, and put them away.
Men like stews, which is why I’m supposed to make one for dinner tonight. If I want any chance of forming some type of decent life for myself, I have to make him like me. It’s what they told me, and it makes good sense.
And if he doesn’t like me...well, does it even matter?
I’d prefer to like him, but I’m in no position to care. He’s not either.
I get on with my chores, losing myself in farm labor.
If I’m being honest with myself, I know that this life is harder than the one I left. In some ways, at least. It’s cleaner here, and I’ll never miss a meal, but the work is vast, and it’s never completely done.
But it’s a good life. One I can be proud of.
By the time Venus had found me, I was well on my way to considering a career on my back. What other life was there for me? I’m pretty enough, and I’d taken a handful of men to bed. I knew what the job entailed, but admittedly, I found the line hard to cross.
By some miracle, I held off long enough and didn’t completely destroy myself before Venus came.
They found me free of drugs and disease, with genes robust enough to better stave off the waste of the world, which led them to offering me a position with Venus. They said it was the most important job, not just in the company, but in the world: repopulating the Earth with strong, healthy humans.
At first, I thought it was a joke when they told me my genes were better than ninety-eight percent of those tested. I damn near died laughing. But they remained dead serious.
Then they took me to a lab, fed me well, and ran all kinds of tests, making sure I was as physically sound as my genetics indicated I was. They told me they had labs set up all over the world, each working to find perfect specimens of our kind to breed.
That’s right—breed!
The revelation was like a sharp slap to the face. Children were a miserable hazard in our dying world. Something you loved and lost, because they were dying younger and younger as the world got worse.
But what could I do? The choice was continue to be cared for and fed, or find my way back into the world.
I couldn’t go back to the life I had before, doing backbreaking labor to afford enough food only to half-starve.
Complying came easy for me because I know how bad things could get. If they wanted me to bear the next line of healthy children, so be it.
Except that wasn’t all they wanted.
They insisted that what they created be sustainable. Be natural. Be something to build from.
“You can’t build a healthy society out of a sterile lab,” they said.
Fuck, I would have done just about anything to stay clean and well-fed.
They said they had homesteads for people like me. Places to raise a family in a sustainable way that wouldn’t kill the earth and poison the children. Knowing what was coming, they had spent over a decade readying areas like this for people like me.
And the man I get to meet today.
A woman with a stoic expression and angry eyes told me they’d found three good matches for me. When I asked to see them, they refused to show me, telling me it’d be better for us to meet organically.
At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. How laughable it was.
But I had no power then, just as I have none now, so I went along with it.
They promised me I’d be respected by the partner chosen for me, and I had no reason to be afraid.
Easy for them to say.
I know I’m lucky, but all my fairytale dreams of love and making it out of my waste of a town never included an arranged relationship with a man I’ve never met.
To make matters worse, this isn’t just a quick lay I can run away from afterward. This is a forever match. Someone I’ll be raising children with.
Or at least I hope to, because if I can’t produce, there’s no room for me in Venus’s world.
They’ve made that clear.
Hidden lights flash, alerting me that he’ll soon arrive.
The stage is set.
Now I must perform.
I take off the apron and bonnet I had been wearing to do my chores in, and I go to the washroom to tidy up for the man I will soon call mine.